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Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

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Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#631

Post by aaronax »

dheera wrote: post #614
kitcar wrote: post #11

Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans.

Thought question here. What if we hyped up bitcoin to 10X its current value? Wouldn't that mean that per real-world transaction / per unit dollar value it would use 1/10th of its current amount of energy? For example something that would normally cost 0.1 BTC would now cost 0.01 BTC.

The block rewards issued to miners would be worth 10x as much, so more equipment would be pressed into use for mining, until the expenses of mining roughly equal the current value of the block rewards (plus transaction fees, for the nit pickers out there).

10x price increase equals 10x mining expenditure, mostly on energy.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#632

Post by Godel_unicode »

dmingod666 wrote: post #586
hannasanarion wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deflationary currency is useless currency. There is a reason that every deflationary period in modern monetary history was immediately followed by a catastrophic depression. Contrary to the dollar-sign-eyed bitcoin hacks, the purpose of money is to be exchanged for goods and services, not to sit in an account forever while you watch numbers go up.

As a person holding a certain amount of currency, the last thing you want is the govt to print more. That is essentially the govt putting a hand in your pocket and taking away cash by diluting what you already have. Is land a bad thing to buy because they are not making more of it? I'm sure you know you can exchange those numbers for other numbers that show up in your bank if you're inclined..

As a person who makes goods/provides services, what you want is for the government to ensure there is enough money for others to buy/hire your good/service.

As a person who wants to buy a house but doesn't have the full purchase price in liquid dollars, the thing you want is for the government to give lenders access to low-cost money so they can then lend it to you at low rates so you can afford the principal+interest on your loan.

As a person with savings to invest, you want to know that the bonds you're buying will be paid back with some interest to balance the risk of higher-yield stocks/bonds.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#633

Post by DennisP »

groos wrote: post #528
kempbellt wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old. No need to be ageist. It's a fair perspective. There is a quality of independence and agency that comes from being able to purchase things with cash. Ironically, your weed transaction is a perfect example of that. I am a little confused by your argument though. Are you saying that you used cash because you couldn't pay legally with a debit/credit card or something…

Re. buying/selling with BTC, one other problem is stability of value. Without stability, usability as a currency becomes hard. How does one even list items' cost in BTC when the value of BTC is constantly fluctuating?

There are stablecoins on Ethereum that fix that problem. Some of them are derivatives backed by nothing but ETH.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#634

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

Zamicol wrote: post #618
SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're spot on. The ETH fans love to wax poetic about PoS and how it's always around the corner and coming soon. It's been that way for ages. Lightning Network is similar. It's been perpetually 6 months away for years. Frankly, I'll be impressed if the current power structure within PoW cryptos doesn't find any way to hamstring PoS, mostly because they have a vested interest in keeping everything the way it is now.

Eth 2.0 is running right now. It is 100% PoS.

I don't see anyone really using it though. That's the thing. Which makes me wonder if it's really ready.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#635

Post by vntok »

nelsontodd wrote: post #283
UncleMeat wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You get a choice between bitcoin mining and military force" That was literally a quote from the post being responded to.

'You get a choice between bitcoin mining and military force' to solve the consensus issue. Bitcoin doesn't solve, for example, hate crimes or something like this.

Yes it is truly amazing how bad people are at reading and how fast they are at reaching (bad) conclusions from they already bad read.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#636

Post by abriosi »

tyrust wrote: post #307
mekoka wrote: post #272

“Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind, and so it’s not a great climate thing” That's the sole actual quote attributed to Bill Gates in that article (which doesn't even link to any source). The rest is the author conflating their thoughts with Bill Gates's.

It's truly a pointless article, but that hasn't stopped tens of people from spitting out the same arguments about bitcoin that you see in every HN thread.

STEMlord's and mad they missed the train once more

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#637

Post by xur17 »

jedberg wrote: post #445
yrral wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is using computing power for bitcoin not beneficial to humanity?

What benefit does it supply to humanity? I can think of plenty of uses for a distributed ledger, but what is the use of Bitcoin that can't be done some other way?

Is there another way to send money over the internet that doesn't involve a third party?

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#638

Post by cableshaft »

saalweachter wrote: post #592
meowkit wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old. I used paper money once last year. To buy weed. Because the federal government has determined I am not responsible enough to use or own weed. No one I know uses physical cash anymore. We’re moving away from physical items where possible, not toward it. I would rather have my currency on a public DLT than cont…

If you want a hipper, 21st-century term all the yutes love, cash is peer-to-peer . Crypto-currencies don't provide a way to transfer value peer-to-peer, online, just a third party that is (hopefully) neutral.

If you both have full node bitcoin wallets it's possible, just like how it worked in the first place. But having a full node on your computer takes up >350GB of space now, so I doubt there's too many people that still do that.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#639

Post by Daho0n »

Gates is the biggest farmer in the US (I know it sounds crazy but he is!). I wonder if he'll do something good with all that land and not be part of the problem he normally seems to advocate against. That could be interesting.

Edit: Downvoted in less than 30 seconds. That must be my new record!

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#640

Post by kbenson »

dmingod666 wrote: post #563
kbenson wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> censorship resisten electronic monetary system I feel sorry for anyone that expects bitcoin to actually be anonymous. Given that we can use statistics and timing to determine the memory contents and instructions run on different cores in a CPU, anyone that uses a currency that keeps public global transaction log and thinks they can anonymize themselves by just mixing their money in a pool is in for a rude awakening…

We would like to recruit your guidance in our search for Satoshi. Thanks in advance.

The only reason satoshi hasn't been found is exactly because he/she/they haven't spent any of those bitcoins.

(Also, the slightest movement in those coins would likely cause a massive drop in the value of bitcoin, as rational people realized a huge cache of previously assumed out of play coins might start being sold and everyone using it as an investment rushed to exit ASAP to avoid beat that).

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